


Somewhere Only We Know

by Elizabeth Tudor (Liz_Tudor)



Category: Lupin III
Genre: Angst, Don't say I didn't warn you, Flashbacks, Gen, Not with a bang but with a whimper, Things Fall Apart - Freeform, a walk in the woods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-23 23:22:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19161100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liz_Tudor/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Tudor
Summary: As soon as she stepped out of the car, Fujiko knew she'd made a mistake, coming here. Not because of any danger.Not like last time. The soft, sunlight-dappled woods were as peaceful as a postcard. The memories, however, hit her like a bellyflop into a pool of ice, rushing at her so cold and painful that she had to fight for breath.It had been dark, then, and they'd all been together, clambering out of the cramped little Fiat, laughing and teasing - until the first gunshots had ripped through the soft fabric of the night, sending them stumbling for cover, laughter dying into something ashy and bitter.





	Somewhere Only We Know

**Author's Note:**

> As the title might imply, this was heavily inspired by the song Somewhere Only We Know, and that's the soundtrack for this one. Listen to whichever version you like - I mostly listened to the Keane version whilst writing this, but the Lily Allen cover might suit Fujiko better.

As soon as she stepped out of the car, Fujiko knew she'd made a mistake, coming here. Not because of any danger. _Not like last time_. The soft, sunlight-dappled woods were as peaceful as a postcard. The memories, however, hit her like a bellyflop into a pool of ice, rushing at her so cold and painful that she had to fight for breath. _It had been dark, then, and they'd all been together, clambering out of the cramped little Fiat, laughing and softly teasing - until the first gunshots had ripped through the soft fabric of the night, sending them stumbling for cover, laughter dying into something ashy and bitter_.

 

Unhurried now, she stepped onto the path. It had been almost two years since she'd been back here. Since any of them had.

 

She had been picturing the path up to the cabin as she had known it, overgrown but easy to follow, grasses and wildflowers poking through the litter of last autumn's drifting leaves, but the woods still showed the ravages of that night. Several times she had to stop and clamber over downed trees, the round pale eyes of hacked-off branches staring hard at her, wondering what she could possibly be doing back here after so long. She wasn't sure herself. Morbid curiosity? She'd come here with the vague idea of collecting the loot they'd left behind, from the job they'd been out celebrating, but that idea sounded less appealing by the minute. 

 

_Goemon, sword flashing in the dim light, slicing through tree after tree, trying to slow their pursuers, forcing herself not to flinch, to just keep running, as the forest giants crashed down a hairsbreadth behind her, screams and splintering wood..._

 

There were no bodies, here. No bones, wrapped in decaying shreds of cloth, lost in the undergrowth. She and the rest of the gang hadn't come back to clean up; their attackers must have sent someone, after word got through and the body count had been tallied.

 

_None of their alarms or defenses had kicked in; they must've been disabled. She was out of bullets, out of options, tearing through the woods for the cabin, where they had weapons, flashlights, night vision sights, where they would be able do more than just flee like prey. The sound of her own panting and thundering pulse had filled her ears, the gunfire spitting and cracking into bark and wood inches from her limbs, unable to see where she was going; she had thought she'd imagined it, the hoarse voice gasping, "Keep running!" as a sheet of darkness fell away to her right._

 

The path dipped gently towards the stream, muttering its plans to become a river someday, splashing around the three time-smoothed stepping stones that spanned its breadth. A low hill rose to her left, gnarled, moss-covered tree roots forming natural benches and sitting places, sunny and inviting. She couldn't look at it.

 

_Stumbling through the stream, gasping for breath, trying to plan, trying to figure out who might be behind this, as the low bark of a heavy gauge pistol joined the staccato snap of machine gun fire._

 

The path meandered around a few more hills, and her thighs burned softly with the exertion of carrying her up to the clearing. Over the final rise, and the cabin came into view. They hadn't bothered closing up, in their desperation to get back to the fight, and Fujiko could see the evidence of squirrels and mice as she peered in through the door, gaping like a toothless scowl. She had to push, hard, to force it over the rotting carpet.

 

The inside...it was achingly familiar, but entirely strange. The red couch they'd napped and fought and fucked and watched movies on, exactly where they'd left it, but chewed to grey threads. The glossy woodwork dull and peeling, the floor covered in mouse nests and muddy paw prints and stray leaves and twigs. She pulled a book off the shelves that lined one wall, and though the gilt edging shone brightly, the pages were warped by water and speckled with mildew. She flipped through a few, then put it back.

 

It wasn't hard to find the piles of money, scattered across the living room floor, but when she picked up one of neatly banded bundles, it crumbled to dust and fragments in her hands. She was almost relieved, in a way, that she couldn't take it with her. During the years they'd occasionally stayed here, the cabin had echoed with shouting and bickering and laughter, but now, silent and dingy, it felt sacrosanct, like a place humans were no longer welcome, waiting only to rot back into nothingness.

 

The dishes they'd always argued about doing were still in the empty sink, rusting now, just like the guns Lupin had dropped, scattered over the floor. He'd reached the house a few breaths ahead of her, adrenaline making his hands jittery as he fumbled the clip into the magazine, ignoring the half-dozen pistols and rifles that'd fallen as he yanked the guns he wanted out of the messily stacked closet.

 

_As the clip clicked into place, Lupin paused, glanced behind her._

_"Where's...?"_

_She didn't need to ask who he was looking for - Goemon was here, hakama torn and splattered with blood, Lupin was here, tossing her a gun...she understood at the same moment he did, eyes widening with sudden fear, turning and tearing off down the hill, towards the sporadic pop and hiss of gunfire, muffled screams rising out of the woods._

 

What they'd found had been a goddamn massacre. At least two dozen armed goons must have been waiting for them. Three or four might even have been in decent enough shape to survive, but Goemon, his face drawn with desperate dread, hadn't given them a chance, either to escape or to attack. Blood and gore had coated the forest floor like offal in an abattoir, and though Fujiko was by no means squeamish, she could feel the nausea rising in her with the panic, hot and sick, as she played her flashlight over the slimy ground, scanning for a green-banded Borsalino, a tailored dark jacket, _anything..._

_"Over here!"_

 

He had managed to drag himself away from the battleground; they found him with his back against a tree, his hat long since vanished, dark hair falling over his eyes as his head tipped back. He would've looked almost peaceful, as though he'd sat down for an afternoon nap, if it hadn't been for the raw and bloody mess that had been made of his insides, just visible under the arm clamped tight across his stomach, and the tattered remnants of one of his legs, black fabric ripped away with bone and muscle.

 

Astoundingly -

 

_"He's still breathing!" she'd yelled, dropping her gun and turning, ready to run for the first aid kit, if they could get him to car, if they could patch him up, just enough to make it to a hospital..._

_"Fujiko."_

_Lupin's voice, soft and uncharacteristically serious, cut through the haze, half-formed triage calculations and mental maps to the nearest towns spluttering out like spent fireworks._

**_"What?"_ **

_" **Look.** "_

_And she had, forcing herself to study him, to apply the same ruthless precision that had kept her alive when jobs went wrong._

_His perpetual tan had faded to grey, blood loss stripping all the color out of him. He was breathing, yes, but it was shallow and frayed, and blood was still oozing out of the gashes torn through clothes and skin. The nearest hospital was half an hour away. It would take them at least ten minutes to get him to the car. There was no way they could get a tourniquet around the gaping hole in his abdomen, and though the first aid kit in the cabin was well stocked, it did not contain blood packs. It would be blood loss that did it._

_She'd seen plenty of people die, but this was something unknown to her, this helplessness and sickening inevitability._

 

_"...how long?"_

 

_"Fifteen minutes," Goemon said quietly, and if any of them knew, well, it probably would be him. "Maybe a little less."_

 

They stayed there a lot longer than fifteen minutes. She had her arms around Goemon, only a few fingertips on _his_ shoulder, stroking his arm through the suit coat, but Lupin and Goemon were huddled as close to him as they could get, could surely tell when the slow, ragged breathing finally stopped shuddering out and his skin began to grow cold. It didn't matter. As long as they were here, it was still all four of them, as it had always been. To move would be to sunder that, irreversibly. So they just didn't.

 

She hadn't looked at a clock in what felt like lifetimes, and it was silent, broken lifetimes later that the ink-dark woods began to grow grey, then violet, then soft, pearly gold, bringing a gentle but unyielding end to their unspoken plea.

 

He was gone, and they couldn't make that untrue any more than they could stop the sun from rising. Fujiko had forced herself to her feet, reorienting herself. If the stream was there, at the base of the hill, the car had to be behind them - back through the gore-soaked woods. She couldn't quite quash her dismay at the thought. She had had enough of blood tonight, but it wasn't over yet.

 

_"Come on," she prompted gently, when Lupin and Goemon made no move to rise. "We don't know if there are any more of them in the woods, or any more on their way. There's nothing else we can do here. We have to go."_

_It had taken a few long minutes, but both of them had finally staggered to their feet, like puppets with half their strings cut. Goemon had immediately stooped to pick up the limp, bloodstained ragdoll that was all that was left of one of the few people she'd ever cared about. Fujiko moved to help, but Goemon had shrugged her away._

_"I've got him," he said softly._

 

They'd kept the traditional forty-nine days of mourning for him. Even she hadn't objected. He was one of their own, and if they didn't take the time to send him off as well as they could - who else would? Lingering sadly at the edge of the strictly observed rites was the hope that there'd be someone to mourn for the rest of them, that this wouldn't come down to just one of them left behind, slowly fading into obscurity.

 

If there was an afterlife, she hoped he'd made it there safely, that his worry for the rest of their little family hadn't been enough to bind him to this world. If it had...were you stuck haunting the place where you'd died? Given a choice, she knew he'd want to keep an eye on Lupin and the rest of them, but if he was stuck at the cabin...well, it could be worse, she supposed. They'd made a lot of good memories there. Those were just outweighed by one very, very bad one.

 

_Lupin had climbed into the driver's seat, as usual, but though his face was perfectly composed, his hands were shaking so badly he couldn't get the keys into the ignition. Fujiko had given it a minute, then gently plucked the keyring from his fingers, scooting him over to the passenger seat. She didn't know where they were going, as she cranked the little car to life, just that they couldn't stay - couldn't possibly bear to stay - here. The entire while she was driving aimlessly, Goemon had sat in the back, the sad, limp head in his lap, gently stroking the pale forehead._

All of them dealt with it differently. Lupin was prone to breaking anything he tried to pick up. Eventually he gave up, sat with his hands twitching in his lap, unable to figure out what to do with himself, insisting to anyone who asked that he was fine, really, completely okay. Goemon was silent, snapping whenever she tried to talk him into eating something, sinking back into his cloud of brooding self-recrimination as soon as she moved away. Fujiko...she had been very, very angry. Why, in the name of all eight hells, had he stayed behind? After all the times he'd nagged at her for working alone, insisting that they worked better together, trusting each other! They had always made it through before, yeah, _together,_ and if he had just stayed with them, instead of handling an entire fucking unit on his own, this might not have happened. Stupid, martyrific idiot, too damn willing to jump straight into the deep end of danger, and this time he sank.

 

...Or maybe it would've happened anyway, or, if he hadn't stayed to draw their heat, maybe all of them would've died. He had been the farthest back; maybe he had seen what she hadn't, had realized there was no other way. Or, maybe he did just care that little about his own life.

 

That was the unutterable hell of it, was not knowing.

 

She wished, badly, she'd been able to ask him, but by the time they'd found him, he was already unconscious. She didn't know how much he might've been aware of, during those last minutes, whether he knew they were there at all. _Oh god, please let him have known we were there. That we found him._

 

One thing was for sure. If there _was_ an afterlife, and she met him there, he had better have a damn good explanation or the first thing she was going to do would be to break his stupid nose for leaving them like this. She had not known a great many people her own age, growing up, but she imagined that this might be what losing a sibling felt like.

 

_It had been more than an hour after Fujiko had started driving that Lupin finally spoke, did something other than stare blankly out the window._

_"We forgot his hat."_

_Fujiko had tightened her grip on the wheel, fighting not to point out that they couldn't help that now, fighting the urge to immediately turn around and go look for it..._

_"...I s'pose it doesn't matter now."_

 

She and Goemon had taken it in turns to stay with Lupin. They didn't quite trust that they could leave him alone just yet. God, how many years had it been, since Lupin had really been alone? Usually _he_ was right there, being sarcastic and making sure that the two of them kept enough money from the latest job to be able to eat.

 

A few weeks after the forty-nine days had ended, Goemon had disappeared, returning silent and stone-faced, splattered with blood. She didn't need the news report about the mysterious deaths of the few remaining members of a notorious local gang to know what had happened. It hadn't really changed anything. Neither of them had expected it would, but he wouldn't be Goemon if he had left it undone.

 

When it was Goemon's turn to stay, she'd wander, stealing from jewelry stores or mansions sporadically, hoping to outrun this malaise by putting up a show of normalcy. It had never quite worked.

 

And all the while Lupin had stayed listless and almost catatonic. It made her want to scream. Her temper, usually so perfectly controlled, had been flaring like a brushfire more and more often as the strain and pointlessness crushed down on her, and loss seared under her skin like live wires, leaving her raw and aching. Usually, she got along the most easily with Goemon, but lately it seemed like they couldn't speak to each other without snapping, or worse, falling into over-polite, pointedly passive aggressive unpleasantries.

 

Lupin, who usually had enough surplus energy to fuel a small city, was lethargic and indifferent. Goemon's usual patience and composure had given way to irritation and sullen anger. She, who prided herself on her poise and presentation, was losing her temper. She supposed they all dealt with it in different ways. Not that it helped much.

 

It had come to a head right after she'd returned from another round of vacant wandering, tired and irascible, unable to find any of the things she had been looking for, tangible or otherwise.

 

They had...both said things they'd regret.

 

_"Stop pretending you care," Goemon had snapped, when she'd asked how Lupin was, in an attempt to steer the fraying conversation back into safer waters. "You're just here out of pity. You leave every chance you get, and why would you not? You never liked him, and you never cared about leaving us before. The way you two fought, you're probably even glad he's dead, he always saw right through you."_

 

_That had smarted, badly. Did Goemon truly think she didn't care that one of them was gone, that the landscape of their little family had shifted forever, that she was really that selfish?_

_Unfortunately, it had escalated from there._

_"Go fucking sit under a waterfall and hide then, like you always do when things get too complicated! Since you've seen through my clever act, clearly nothing keeping you here, you stupid, gullible dupe. You never could see what was right in front of your nose. Couldn't protect him either. Bet your ancestors would be real fucking proud."_

 

_Lupin had watched them, silent, until Goemon had stormed out, then went back to staring out the window, chin in his hand._

 

After four days, it became clear that Goemon wasn't coming back, and Fujiko couldn't take any more. She hadn't been able to bear the silence, the purposelessness, the newspaper articles left out, half-hopefully, detailing which shiny treasures were being displayed at what museum, which Lupin hadn't so much as glanced at. Her temper was still coiled hot and tight inside her, like a snake about to strike, and she was afraid that if she stayed, she would hurt him. She could picture it so easily, grabbing his shoulders until they bruised under her hands, screaming into his face, trying to shake some of himself back into him, and had to clench her hands to keep her fingers from twitching, as though towards a particularly tempting piece of jewelry. She would _not_ get angry at Lupin for being torn up over the loss of his best friend. But she couldn't stay here, or she...she didn't know what she'd do.

 

So instead she'd done the only other thing she could think of, and called Zenigata.

 

_He'd responded to the tip-off with admirable alacrity. Unsurprising, really; it had been months, he had to've been driving himself crazy, wondering what they were up to. He had arrived with his entire squad in tow. She wished she would have told him that that was unnecessary, but it was too late now._

_The inspector had insisted on going in alone. Small favors. He came back out ten minutes later, looking faintly stunned, his arm around the shoulders of a cuffed Lupin, who was making no attempts at all to escape._

 

The sight of it had hurt, but she couldn't help him, couldn't keep trying, and Zenigata could be trusted to keep him safe, even if it was safely inside a cell. Maybe that meant Goemon was right about her. She didn't know anymore.

 

Her mixed feelings curdling in her stomach like bad dairy, she'd watched them leave, lights dimmed and sirens silent as an unmarked grave.

 

She'd always thought that if their stable little molecule ever came undone, it would go off like an explosion, a blazing nuclear reaction. Not this sad, shaky fading-out as their unstable isotope reached the end of its half-life and they peeled off amid bad feelings and half-desperate betrayals.

 

_Is this really how we fall apart? Not with a bang, but with a whimper._

 

Fujiko had wandered, pulling jobs as she needed the money. Occasionally she'd find a lover who could keep her in the sort of style she demanded, but no matter how opulent the gifts, she never stayed for long. Her appetite for playing the twittering songbird in the gilded cage had soured.

 

She couldn't stop the fight with Goemon from looping through her head. She hadn't truly meant what she'd said, but Goemon was a lot less impetuous than she had become, under the strain. Did he mean it? After years of friendship, did he really think that little of her?

 

And worse - what if he was right to. It was an open secret that she liked Lupin and Goemon better, had never really gotten along with him any more than he'd particularly liked her. Would she really have been more upset, if one of the two of them had died that night, instead of him? She didn't know herself, but she found it hard to imagine feeling worse than she already did.

 

It was a moot point, regardless. He was dead, and they were alive, but she'd lost all three of them anyway.

 

Whenever this thought occurred to her, she buried herself in notes and plans for her latest job, tension buzzing like hornets under her skin.

 

Finally, finally, Lupin had woken up enough to break out of prison, much to Zenigata's barely-disguised relief. It had taken another few months for his heists to start showing up in the papers, and when they did they were wobbly, uninspired things, no more than could be managed by one person struggling to remember how exactly this was supposed to work without partners. She followed them all the same, with a sort of fierce, aching hunger.

 

His capers started getting more daring, gaining in confidence and panache as he remembered himself. They were still nothing on the scale of what they had pulled off together.

 

As Lupin's exploits started taking up more of the newspaper though, Fujiko had stopped reading them, when the nostalgic longing had started to bitter. Instead, she did her best to stay busy, throwing herself into her work in a way that she hadn't in years. Intelligence and counter-intelligence, theft, subterfuge, modeling, politics - she took every job she could find, trying hard to occupy her brain with enough blueprints and code names and contracts and safety deposit box combinations that she wouldn't have to _think_. Because it had ended. Because the way it had ended made it clear that trying to write a new start was unlikely. Because it had been so much easier to ignore when there wasn't the _possibility_. Because even if it was possible, it wouldn't be - couldn't remotely be - the same. Because he was gone, and nothing she could possibly do would change that, so what was the point.

 

Unfortunately, the number of jobs in her particular fields was finite. The thing with the Chilean ambassador had finished up. None of her contacts had anything new for her. The only job left was one that she really, really didn't want to take - but after two days of driving herself crazy, pacing like a caged tiger, unable to stop the fight or the memories of that night from playing across the insides of her eyelids yet again, she'd caved and accepted it, just to have something to do.

 

After breaking into Zenigata's apartment though, she hadn't gotten more than a few steps towards his filing cabinets, eyes darting around the shadows...and landing on the low shelves holding his household altar and family relics, abruptly fastening there like an anchor. A dozen photos of square-jawed relatives in uniform, and one, set a little to the side, of a crooked smile and a fedora pulled low over shaggy hair.

 

She was still standing there, holding the framed photo, when Zenigata got home.

 

_"He's...family, after all," the inspector mumbled, lowering his pistol and moving to stand next to her. "...of a sort." He was flushing red, but the expression he wore was one of resigned misery rather than embarrassment. "What is it you want, Mine?"_

 

He flushed even harder, expression twisting into startlement, when Fujiko handed him the picture, kissed him on the cheek, and left as silently as she'd come.

 

A few months later, she found herself here.

 

She still wasn't sure why she'd come back. If she'd been looking for _him_ , she didn't think she would find him here; the cabin seemed sad and decaying and neglected, but not haunted. Honestly, that was a relief. After seeing what it'd come to, she hated the thought that he might've been stuck here alone, while the place they had loved crumbled around him. Wherever he was now, it wasn't here.

 

A single sunbeam arched in through one of the murky windows and kissed her shoes, warm on her ankles as she scanned the room. The mantelpiece above the cabin's riverstone fireplace had come loose, a dusty handful of framed photos tipped over or canted at ridiculous angles as the cardboard supports rotted and slumped. Fujiko gently righted the ones that had fallen, propping them against the mantle. She paused when she got to the last one.

 

The glass was foggy and crabbed with dust, but when she broke the frame apart and extracted the photo, it shone glossy and unfaded.

 

It had been taken here, about a quarter mile down the stream, at a spot Lupin had found where a shoulder-high waterfall formed a natural swimming pool, achingly cold and perfectly clear. There was Goemon, planted under the low waterfall as usual, but his eyes were open, and he was smiling. Herself, basking on the sun-warmed rocks to the side of the pool, schematics and diagrams abandoned in favor of simply soaking in the warmth and respite. And Jigen...not wearing his hat, for once, his hair plastered over his eyes by the water until she wondered how he could possibly see, leaning out of the pool to adjust the camera, completely unaware of the wriggling fish the maniacally grinning Lupin in the background was about to throw at him...

 

She remembered that day, and the yelling and splashing and chaos that had followed after the photo was taken. A small tsunami had washed over her notebooks, and she'd stood to yell at them...and Lupin and Jigen had done that thing, glancing at each other and having a full conversation without ever making a sound, and the two of them had yanked her straight into the freezing pool and splashed her, until she had chased Jigen out of the water and made Lupin beg for mercy.

 

At the time, she'd been fuming, but now, she was glad those memories were hers to keep.

 

She felt something tight in her throat, burning as though she'd swallowed a flickering coal, and if she opened her mouth she was going to cry, so she smiled instead, and folded the photo neatly in half and tucked it into her purse. They had loved this place, so, so much, and that was over now. She wouldn't be coming back.

 

Lupin had stolen a crown in Monaco a week ago, and gotten caught, and gotten arrested. He seemed to get arrested a lot lately, though it never stuck for very long. He could probably use a partner; maybe then it wouldn't happen so much. Lupin would probably have a better idea of where Goemon was too - last she'd heard, he was somewhere in the Hindu Kush, but that didn't really narrow it down.

 

She might have to apologize. She'd see. Lupin had forgiven her for worse than this before. If Lupin accepted it, Goemon would too, eventually.

 

She'd make this work.

 

It probably wouldn't be easy, at first. The four of them had been a nicely stable arrangement. As they'd found out, the three of them...were less so. But she'd make it work.

 

 _They'd_ make this work, as well as they could. All of them.

**Author's Note:**

> It had to be either Jigen or Goemon. I flipped a coin before I started writing, and it came up Jigen. =( In a way I'm kind of glad, I don't know if I could've done that to Goemon.
> 
> Blame my university's radio station for this one, if you must. It's usually what I listen to when I'm working in the lab, and I swear they play that song at least twice a day, and it gives me Feels every damn time.


End file.
